The all-new Nook is being styled as the easiest e-reader on the market. It features a 6-inch touchscreen display and it weighs just 210g. The device offers up to two months battery life on a single charge and will retail for $139 (£85.89). It has wi-fi but not 3G and will ship into the United States this summer. The new Nook also features Nook Friends—a book recommendation-based social network that will be backed by MyNook, a website for sharing with friends.

Continuing the recent trend of slowly filling in the details of the upcoming tablet additions to the Kindle family, we have finally gotten a little bit in the way of technical specs. It is certainly true that you have to take everything these tipsters say with a grain of salt, but the timing seems right for more information to be making its way out and the site that released the information has a fairly reliable track record.

One of the key buzzwords of this BEA is “discovery.” In an age of abundance (as reported last week, more than 3.2 million books were published last year), getting your book to cut through the noise is a very complicated, yet essential, matter. This is especially difficult in the digital marketplace, where there are no bookstore displays to facilitate “happy accidents,” and no booksellers to match favorite books with loyal customers.

There were a couple of tell-tale signs last week that Google may be having some pain and problems with its vastly ambitious Google Books project. First, was the news that Google was pulling the plug on its corresponding, open-ended, plan to scan and database masses of historic newspaper archives. Second a report that Google was diverting all its programmers from its eBookstore and perhaps not vigorously pursuing plans selling eBooks.

Good news for the companies that announced new e-readers this week: The number of people in the U.S. who own an dedicated e-reader (not an iPad or other multi-function tablet) has quadrupled since 2009, to 8.7 percent of the population (20.6 million people), new research from eMarketer shows. By 2012, the company predicts that 12 percent of U.S adults, or 28.9 million people, will own an e-reader, up from 1.9 percent in 2009.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the June 5, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending May 21, 2011.

22 de maio de 2011

In the age of rapid digital revolution in publishing, when readers have book review options ranging from decades-old publications like The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New York Times Book Review, to Twitter book clubs, literary websites, online publications like this one, and Amazon reader reviews, what is the role of the book reviewer? And how has that role changed?

It is definitely no longer a secret that Amazon(NASDAQ:AMZN) is working on a Kindle Tablet. It hasn’t been for a good long while now. While Amazon has not officially come out and confirmed or given any details on what we can expect, little by little details are leaking out and causing talk.

Curatorship and discoverability -– these were the buzz terms at the UK’s Book Industry Conference (BIC) which opened on Monday in King’s Cross, London. Speakers representing independent shops on both sides of the Atlantic emphasized how good bricks and mortar bookshops are at “curating” a vibrant stock perfectly tailored to their community, while both said that one of the key ways in which physical bookshops can win in the battle against the online giants is in their ability to act as a huge shop window. Put simply, more books are discovered in bookshops than they are on Amazon.

Amazon.com is now selling more Kindle books than paperbacks and hardbacks combined, with its UK business shifting twice as many e-books as hardbacks, it has announced today.

Gordon Willoughby, the European director for Kindle, called the UK rate of Kindle purchases “truly astonishing” considering the company has been selling hardbacks for 13 years, and Kindle books for nine months. Since 1st April 2011, for every 100 hardcover books Amazon.co.uk has sold, it has sold 242 Kindle books. The figure excludes free Kindle books but includes hardcover sales even if there is no equivalent Kindle edition.

Waterstone’s parent company HMV announced this morning that it would sell the UK book chain to Russian billionaire Alexander Mamut’s company, A&NN Capital Fund Management, for GBP 53 million.

In a surprising move, The Bookseller reports that Waterstone’s current Managing Director Dominic Myers will be replaced by James Daunt to run the bookstore chain after the deal is completed. Myers will take on another role within HMV.

When Amazon talks about how ebooks are selling in relation to print books, as they did again this week, they are comparing apples to apples. They are comparing what their customers bought in digital form versus what they bought in print in any given period of time.

When PW or the AAP or even the publishers themselves talk about how the industry is doing selling ebooks in relation to print books, they are usually comparing apples to oranges. They are comparing what actual consumers bought from retailers in digital form with what retailers and wholesalers bought from publishers in print form for any period of time. So they are comparing ebooks that consumers actually bought now with print books that consumers might, or might not, buy later.

I wouldn’t necessarily recommend this to a first-time author. A self-published book is almost certainly going to end up on the digital slush pile, with fewer readers than the average blog post. But for a writer like me, which is to say, most working writers — midcareer, midlist, middle-aged, more or less middlebrow, and somewhat Internet savvy — self-publishing seems to make a lot of sense at this point. Early in my career, because of some lucky breaks and a kinder economy, I was able to get advances that helped me support my family over the months it took to write a book. I haven’t been a huge best seller, and I’ve never seen a residual check except for an independently published book of crime stories that I edited, and that was only because I got nothing up front. But I’ve built a modest audience and a name. Now that the advances are smaller and the technology is available, why not start appealing directly to those readers?

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the May 29, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending May 14, 2011.

Announcing the winner, Rick Gekoski, chair of the judges, said that for 50 years, Roth's books have "stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience".

"His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally," said Gekoski. "His career is remarkable in that he starts at such a high level, and keeps getting better. In his 50s and 60s, when most novelists are in decline, he wrote a string of novels of the highest, enduring quality. Indeed, his most recent, Nemesis (2010), is as fresh, memorable, and alive with feeling as anything he has written. His is an astonishing achievement."

15 de maio de 2011

Without going into the many causes of this fact (high prices for ebooks, geographical limitations on sales and so on), it is worth considering whether the rise of the pirate sites is actually all bad for the sales of ebooks…. And it seems that perhaps the picture is not as black and white as is generally thought.

In a post on the CBC website, this is gone into at some depth, and it would appear that instead of decreasing legal sales of ebooks, the appearance of any particular ebook on a pirate website can actually increase the legal sales of that particular ebook – in other words, the illegal copies seem to act as a sort of advertisement for the legal ones, if you see what I mean.

The Namibian government has a goal of installing computers in every school and every community library in the country by 2014. This is one of the key objectives of the country’s Vision 2030 policy, according to Veno Kauaria, Director of the Library and Archive Service in Namibia’s Ministry of Education. But like many African countries, it faces crippling infrastructure challenges: an inadequacy of electricity supply, and of internet connectivity.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Is it the end for publishing - or a new beginning? These days publishers are all too familiar with reading their own obituaries. I hope the next two days will put paid to that. The book industry is not on the verge of extinction - or it needn’t be. Every new form of information technology sounds the death knell of previous forms - or so runs the familiar argument. Radio signalled the end of print, TV the end of radio, cinema the end of theatre - and so on. Since all this is demonstrably untrue, it’s strange that we still give it so much credence. Each medium was indeed transformed by its presumed assassin. But through the change, they not only survived - but actually thrived in a new age.

How do you light a reflective screen? I’d go with a clip on light, myself, but the only real way to integrate a light source would be to embed a front light. That’s what Qualcomm did with their new Mirasol demo. And this is indeed their new demo; it’s the first time it’s been shown off.

The bad news is that the finished products won’t hit the market until fall.

Push Pop Press, a company set up by former Apple employees Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas, has published Our Choice, an app version of Gore’s 2009 book about global warming.

The app, according to Push Pop Press, “will change the way we read books”. It combines high quality photography with interactive graphics and animations. There is narration from Gore himself and more than an hour of video.

Though the idea of publishing as a data-driven industry may still be anathema to its old guard, the Book Industry Study Group’s 8th annual Making Information Pay conference hammered home once again that gathering and managing the right data is critical to “future-proofing” the industry. The key is using data to improve content and product development, book discovery and rights management, as well as customer loyalty and profitable growth, said Book Industry Study Group chair Scott Lubeck in his introduction to the ten presentations packed into last Thursday morning’s meeting at the McGraw-Hill auditorium in New York.

Dedicated e-readers could die out within five years, killed off by the rise of smartphones at the lower end of the market, and by tablets at the top. That’s the view of Benedict Evans, digital media guru at London-based consultancy Enders Analysis and Chair of the final day of the World e-Reading Congress which concluded in the city Wednesday (read our coverage of the first day’s session). “At the moment, readers have a window driven by price because tablets are so expensive. But I think many more people will read on phones in the future. The Kindle is dreadful -– it’s like reading a fax, and you have so little on the screen…”

Blogger. Vlogger. Tweeter. Author. Journalist. These words aren’t synonymous, and yet they all have one thing in common: behind these terms are people who are jockeying in the media world for your attention. They could be selling something (whether novel or life insurance), cooking something, “curating” something, or actually reporting something. No matter what their goals are, their media platforms differ as much as their topics.

It’s rightly claimed that no technology ever dies completely — there are still buggy whips being made, you can still listen to AM radio, and you can still dance the jitterbug to a live band. But there is a threshold below which the impact of a technology becomes negligible. When this happens, artists, creative people, and innovators move on.

The printed book will persist. It will just become something different — carefully crafted infrequently and for collectors.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the May 22, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending May 7, 2011.